


The Nameless City

by sevenofspade



Series: The Adventures in Baby-Sitting of Victor von Doom [2]
Category: FF (Comics), Young Avengers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 10:28:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2728997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or: "Doctor Doom and Stature's Excellent Adventure"</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nameless City

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Strange Aeons](https://archiveofourown.org/works/596171) by [sevenofspade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade). 



> This work spins off from Strange Aeons, but all you need to know about that fic is that Nathaniel Richards has been messing with the timeline to save Cassie's life and Cassie has teamed up with Doctor Doom to save the timeline.

They're two-thirds of the way to fixing the mess Kang's made of the timestream when Cassandra says, "I don't want to die."

"When we restore the timeline, you will be dead," Victor says. He's not arguing, per se.

"No," she says, "it just has to look like I did."

"How do you propose we accomplish this?"

"You don't kill me, you just put me in a coma," she says, "or cause locked-in syndrome, that works too."

It's an ingenious plan, but it wouldn't work. "Kang would know if you were not truly dead. His armour would register your heartbeats."

She frowns and pinches her lips. "What's your plan, then?"

"You die and I transfer your consciousness into a clone body," Victor says.

"A) That's creepy and B) do you even have what's needed for this?" Cassandra asks.

"I have the infrastructure necessary," Victor says.

"Everyone heard about your little Loki-cloning fiasco," Cassandra says, rolling her eyes, "but that's not what I asked. Where are you going to get a copy of my DNA and consciousness?"

The Loki cloning was not a fiasco; it achieved precisely what it was supposed to. "I believe Kristoff has a lock of hair you gave him when you were children," Victor says, "but the only time we meet is moments before your death."

She frowns again, briefly. "How did Kristoff get so old? He was my age back then and now he's not? What's up with that?"

"Timetravel," Victor says, even though he's not so sure himself. There are years of Kristoff's life that he cannot account for, in more ways than one.

"I hate timetravel," Cassandra says.

"I know," Victor says. It is not a sentiment he agrees with himself, but then, he supposes her experiences with it have been broadly less positive than his.

"Nanites," Cassandra says. "To stop my heart as I lay in a coma."

"That does appear to be more reasonable," Victor says. He holds out his hand to her.

She does not take his hand.

They travel back to her childhood and inject her with latent nanomachines.

This is the easy part. This is the part that will allow them to try over and over again to make her live when she should have died. All that they will have to do is reprogram the nanites and activate them at the appropriate time and keep trying until it works.

It is not as easy as it sounds.

The timing has to be exceedingly precise, both in the activation and deactivation of the nanites, so that they are not noticed by any of the apparatus capable of detecting them.

More than a fight against young Kang, for Victor, it is essentially a fight against himself. He does not like those, and never has. One of him always loses and it is not always the one he is not.

There is also the emotional component to the scene. It is not that Victor regrets the events that lead to Stature's death in any way; it is that he was not entirely himself at the time. Because of entropic cascade failure, he can feel the ghostly fingers of the Lifestream's power dragging across his brain, feeling for a groove to hook their claws into.

It is not a pleasant feeling, not when it isn't drowned out by the bliss and oblivion the power brings with it.

She does not speak of it, but Victor knows Cassandra can feel herself dying over and over and over again. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she is the best candidate to activate the nanites. 

It does not please Victor to have a child do his dirty work, but it her life and she is owed the right to decide what to make of it.

It would perhaps help if she were able to activate the nanites properly. He tells her as such.

"Please," she says, "it's your code that's all wrong."

"Why did you not then say so while I was coding?" It's the fifteenth time they've tried this. Surely she has had time enough to recognise flaws in his code, should there be any — and there are not.

"Right, like you take responsibility for your mistakes." Her voice is bitter. "You don't even accept when you've made one."

"Doom does not make mistakes," he says.

She laughs, a painful sound digging itself out of her throat like blood from a wound. "Thank you for proving my point and then I guess that's not me dying out there and you killing me or else that means you're doing it on purpose and if you were, we wouldn't be trying to fix it."

"If my code is all wrong, are we really trying to fix it?" His code is not wrong, but if it were, that would have been the right conclusion to draw.

"Your code's alright, except for the part where its activation has to be precise to the picosecond," she says. "Not even Tommy can react that fast."

"If you are incapable of doing your part, it would be best if I were to handle it," Victor says. His armour can react that fast.

"No offense," she says like she expects him to take offense anyway, "but you've been tripping on second-hand pixie dust every time we've been doing this and I don't trust you this much."

That she trusts him at all is in itself surprising.

"We've tried your way. Let's try mine. Fork over the controls." She holds out her hand. When he does not move, she rolls her eyes. "Dude, come on. Trust is a two-way street."

Victor's eyes narrow behind his mask. "Don't call me 'dude' and no. This is not even your way, it's Kang's."

"So? Worked out so far, didn't it?" She's pulled her arm back, closer to her body and taken a step away from Victor.

"No," Victor says, "it has not. I will not have myself be unmade again for the sake of a girl."

When she speaks again, Cassandra's voice is not her voice. "This girl would have you unmade. She seeks to live rather than die. It is a pointless quest. I will end this world and feed on its remains, but I must thank you, first, for making it possible."

The creature wearing Stature's face touches Victor's forehead through the mask and Victor screams.

He can see suddenly how flimsy reality is, how his travels around this spot in time has worn down the walls of existence until the accursed things beneath, the things that go bump in the endless night, the things Stephen fights as Sorcerer Supreme and not as an Avenger, those things that are blasphemous to the very idea of life itself, are let loose upon the world and it is all his fault.

Images tumble into his mind of hideous entities burning through nameless cities, consuming all in their path, leaving behind not even the faint echo of tragedy.

Everything ends.

Everything ends and fades away like ink in antique books, until the books decay into dust withering in the wind, until they might have well never have existed at all.

Because they haven't. More than death, this is unmaking in its truest, more literal form, unlife, where you have never been and your life was never lived.

Victor is tired and he just wants to die. He knows these are not his thoughts thinking themselves but he cannot stop them.

"On your feet!" Stature says, "You’re Victor von Doom. It should take more than eldritch creatures and Lovecraftian horrors to bring you down."

"I have been a god or held power enough to be called so," Victor says, "more than once. I found it beneath me, always, but if I do so wish it, I can be as such again."

"Well, then, what are you waiting for?" Stature is right.

He is Victor von Doom.

Victor reaches deep inside himself, past all the various shades of him that make up this patchwork version of himself, past all magic save his own, to shades of borrowed greatness. There is power here that is not his. The Beyonder. The Lifestream. The Infinity Gauntlet. All these things and more have made him all-powerful and always, always, he gave the power back. What he becomes he will owe to no one but himself.

The thing about giving something up instead of having it ripped from you is that it's a choice and the thing about choices is that they can always be changed. Loki taught him that.

So now Victor makes a different choice and the power flows back into him, smelling like forever, feeling like lightning and tasting like blood on his tongue.

They tell you power corrupts, but they never tell you what that means. This is what it means: thunder burning through your veins, turning to dust what makes you you, making an empty shell of a hollow heart. Power corrupts absolutely, until it is absolute and all that's left of you is a puppet wearing your face. There is joy in oblivion and you give yourself gladly to it, because you cannot remember anything else mattering this much.

This is also why Victor gave the power back. What he becomes he will become as himself, or not at all.

He is blazing with power enough to end the world now and his words are not his own. "Look at you," the creature says through his mouth, "little boy lost, playing at being a god. You cannot use the power you wield and it is using —"

Then Stature punches him in the face and Victor is himself again.

"Not all those who wander are lost," she says.

"Thank you," Victor says.

"More world saving, less talking, if you can," she says.

Victor stretches his new-found awareness as far as he can, poking and prodding the fabric of existence. While he is away, something else moves in, again.

"You are useless and should never —" Blood is choking him, but the words still spill forth, unconcerned.

This time, Stature's arms wrap around his neck in a stranglehold. "Let him go," she says. "Let him go or I swear I will end you and him along with you."

"You would not dare," the voice speaking through Victor's throat says. "You paint yourself as a hero. You are no killer, little girl."

"Are you willing to take the chance?" Her arms tighten and, almost impossibly, his armour starts giving way, metal digging into his neck, cutting of his air supply. He really should have gone with the trinium alloy instead of the illium one.

Spots dance in front of Victor's eyes, but there is no one else looking out of them now. Stature does not let go and Victor cannot tell her to do so. Even if he could, he does not think she would.

Were he she, he would not.

It is a testament to the strength of her character that she has only resorted to deadly force when necessary and given ample motive. She's felt herself die by his hand seventeen times so far. Dying is never pleasant, much less in such rapid succession.

Victor feels himself go, into the dark and the bright light beyond. It is peaceful and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

And then everything hurts.

Fingers grab at his neckplate and pull, tearing away superficial layers of skin. Victor coughs blood. 

"Are you dead." Cassandra's voice is emotionless. He does not think she would care, either way.

"No," he manages to choke out.

He opens his eyes and he can see tangled swirls of emotions battling beneath her skin, relief, anger, despair, rage, hope, pride, and more.

She does not answer him. She does not need to.

"Can you fix it?" Her voice is her own and she is alone inside her soul. He envies her this.

He takes a deep breath. "No."

"You're useless," she says.

"Not alone," he expands. "This power makes my mind porous to outside influences and perhaps my mind is not the kindest, in any circumstance."

She raises an eyebrow at him.

"I killed you," he says. If he can admit it to himself, he can admit it to her. "And for that I am sorry. It was a waste of potential."

"I'm a person," she says, "not just potential. How do we fix this?"

"I cannot do this alone," Victor says, "but perhaps together —"

"No," she cuts him off. "I've had that thing in my head already, I don't want it back." She sighs. "I don't see how much of a choice I have, though. It's the right thing to do." She smiles. "It's even necessary."

"This hole in reality has to be closed from all sides," Victor says. "Ours is not the only universe affected." He lends her the power of the Lifestream, because it is only right.

She takes it, reluctantly, and Victor lets it go. What he has left is more enough for what he has to do. (And if that means he can now hold his own against the things pushing at the edges of his consciousness... Well.)

He can taste the tear in space-time on the back of his tongue, acrid, bitter and like blood on his lips and down his throat.

"Do your thing," she tells him, her soul bright like springtime sunlight.

Victor opens his mind, until the universe is contained within it. He can feel small pinpricks of consciousness when his mind brushes against the universes where his alternate selves live. He hooks his fingers into the tear into reality and starts pulling it close.

His arms burn with the strain.

"Shove over," Stature says. "Let me help. You’re not supposed to do this alone, remember?"

Between the two of them, they close the hole. Cassandra lets the power go and Victor follows suit. It is only his armour that prevents him from collapsing. His nerves cannot remember how to handle his body and neither can hers. She crumples into a heap.

The armour's exoskeleton is not wired to react to vocal commands, but it is the work of minutes to code it so that it does.

He picks her up.

Her pulse is thready and her neural wave patterns are dangerously low, but she is alive and the timeline is restored. At least, it will be if no one knows she is alive.

He makes it to Latveria with minutes to spare before the timeline finishes reasserting itself.

All there is to do now is wait.

Cassandra Lang has to appear to be dead until such time as Kang travels back to fix the timeline. She is none too happy about being confined to Doomstadt, but she understands the necessity of it.

"I cannot believe," Cassandra says, on one of the very rare occasions they are in the same room, "that Doctor Doom owns the complete collection of every Star Trek series."

"If it makes you feel better," Victor says, "consider that they do not belong to Doctor Doom but to Victor von Doom."

She thinks a moment, her fingers brushing the DVDs' spines. "You know what? I think it just might."

He does not see her for weeks after that, but the DVDs appear and reappear in the shelves and so he knows she is alive.

When she is finished watching Deep Space Nine, she comes into his lab and perches on a table until he turns his attention to her.

"What?" he asks, once his experiment is finished.

"I'm bored," she says. 

The tone of her voice sounds so much like Loki that he absent-mindedly checks that the wards are working. They are. Only Victor's magic will work in this room.

"I would have thought that you were old enough to entertain yourself," he tells her. She has been sixteen for seventy-five days, after all.

She frowns and jumps off the table. "I want a lab. And I want to know how my dad is doing."

"Your father is in the newspaper on a regular basis," Victor says. And so he has been, for the past ten months, for one reason or another.

"He thinks I'm dead!" She pulls back and hugs herself. "Do you think the papers tell me how he's coping with that?"

"You can have Lab Three," he tells her. "There are reprogrammed Doombots in the Baxter Building."

"Thank you," she tells him.

He does not see her again until Kang arrives, Ravona in tow, and even then, it is only to tell her to hide. She goes, with an 'I'm not stupid' whispered under her breath.

Victor misses absolute power singing in his veins and so Kang's plan is appealing. He does not like the shades of himself haunting his castle. They call him Prime Doom, as is his right, but he does not like to think of Doom, even inferior versions, abasing themselves before anyone, not even him.

Cassandra does not like them either. She has no reason to. She does not even like him.

She does not like him but she does love her father.

When Scott Lang has gotten into Latveria and is about to go after him physically and Victor to match him blow for blow, she comes out of the castle, throwing herself between them.

"Dad! Stop! You too, Victor," she says.

"Don't call me Victor," Doom says, while Scott Lang draws back.

"I saved your sorry butt from Cthulhu," she says, "I can call you whatever the fuck I want. Hi, dad."

This last one is addressed to Lang.

"Cassie?" His voice is uncertain and wounded.

She nods. "I'm sorry. God, I'm so sorry."

"Is that really you?" Lang moves towards her, then stops.

"Yes," Victor says and they both look at him with murder in their eyes.

"Alligator, banana, blueberry," Cassandra says, like it makes sense. "I hate timetravel, dad, I hate it _so much_."

"Oh, Cassie," Scott says, his voice breaking on the words. He opens his arms and she throws herself inside them.

She hugs him tight. Victor is not jealous that she got her father back after she thought he was dead, nor is he jealous of this reunion.

"How did you get here?" Scott asks. "What’s going on? Where have you been? How have you been?"

"There was timetravel and we had to make you believe I was dead, dad, I'm sorry. Victor's been nice to me, even by normal, non-Doctor Doom people standards," she says.

"Thank you," Victor says, even though he's not sure he should take that it as a compliment.

**Author's Note:**

> Doctor Doom watching Star trek is [canon](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/dhampyresa/18730143/25815/25815_original.jpg).


End file.
